Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.

The worst thing that can happen to an artist is to be subsidized by the state. It leads to an intellectual and artistic castration.

We must mistrust utopias: they usually end in holocausts.

The truths that seem most truthful, if you look at them from all sides, if you look at them close up, turn out to be either half truths or lies.

I have a chest full of all the insults, villainies, and infamies a man is capable of withstanding. . . . If you become famous, you will have to go through that.

‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.

Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.